DevOps and All The Other “Ops Religions”

I didn’t wake up yesterday thinking, “Today I’ll design a T-shirt for the DevOps Days event in Mountain View.” But as it turns out – that is what happened.

Some thoughts on what went into my word cloud design:

1. DevOps is great. This will be my 4th year attending DevOps Days. I get the organic, bottoms up nature of the “movement.” I’ve been on the receiving end of the “throw it over the wall” scenario. A culture of collaboration and understanding go a long way to address the shortcomings of swim lane diagrams, phase gate requirements and mismatch of incentives that hamper effective app lifecycle execution. Continuous deployment is inspirational, and the creativity and power of the DevOps tool chain is very cool.

2. EnterpriseOps is still a mighty force. I remember an EnterpriseOps panel discussion at DevOps Days 2010. The general disdain for ITIL, coming from a crowd that was high off of 2 days of Web App goodness at Velocity 2010, was palpable. The participant from heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar asked the audience to raise their hand if they had an IT budget of more than $100M. No hands went up in the startup-dominated audience. His reply – “We have a $100M annual spend with multiple vendors.” The awkward silence suggested that EnterpriseOps is a different beast. It was. It still is. There is a lot EnterpriseOps can learn from DevOps, but the problems dealing with massive scale and legacy are just different.

3. InfraOps, AppOps, Service Ops. This model developed by James Urquhart makes sense to me. It especially makes sense in the era of Shape Shifting Killer Apps. We need a multi-tier model that addresses the challenges of running infrastructure (yes, even in the cloud era), the challenges of keeping the lights on behind the API in a distribute component SOA environment and the cool development techniques that shift uptime responsibility to developers, as pioneered by Netflix. Clear division of labor with separation of duties, and a bright light shining on the white space in between, is a model that seems to address the needs of every cloud era constituent.

4. Missing from this 3-tier model is ConsumerOps. Oops. Too late to update the shirt design. Many are consuming IT services offered by cloud service providers; there must be a set of Ops practices that help guide cloud consumption. Understanding and negotiating cloud vendor SLAs and architecting multiple AWS availability zones immediately come to mind. Being a service broker and including 3rd party cloud services as part of an integrate service catalog is another.

5. Tenant Ops. As far as I can tell, this term was coined by Kevin Lees and the Cloud Operations Transformation services team at VMware. See pages 17 and 21 in Kevin’s paper on Organizing for the Cloud. It includes customer relationship management, service governance, design and release, as well as ongoing management of services in a multi-tenant environment. VMware internal IT uses the term to describe what they do running our private cloud internally. They have a pie chart that shows the percentage of compute units allocated to different tenants (development, marketing, sales, customer support, etc). It works. It may be similar to ServiceOps in the three tier model, but feels different enough, with a focus on multi-tenancy and not API driven services, to deserves its own term.

6. Finally CloudOps. This term is meta. It encompasses many of the concepts and practices of all the others. This is a term that describes IT Operations in the Cloud Era. Not just in a cloud, or connected to a cloud. But in the cloud era. The distinction being that the “cloud era” is different than the “client server era,” and implies that many practices developed in the previous era no longer apply. Many still do. But dynamic service delivery models are a forcing function for operational change. That change is happening in five pillars of cloud ops: People, Process, Organization, Governance, and IT business.

So while some of the sessions at this year’s DevOps conference are focused on continuous deployment. I’d bet that all the topics of the “Ops religions” will be covered. Hence the focus on the term CloudOps.

We’ll be live tweeting from DevOps next Friday. Follow us @VMwareCloudOps or join the discussion using the #CloudOps hashtag.

About Kurt Milne

Kurt Milne is the Director of Product Marketing at VMware with more than 20 years of experience in various executive management, engineering, and analyst positions at leading tech companies, including Hewlett-Packard, BMC Software and several startups. In 2011, he released a book called “Visible Ops Private Cloud: from virtualization to private cloud in 4 practical steps”. Formerly the Managing Director of the IT Process Institute, he was the primary investigator and author of 6 major research studies on private cloud, virtualization, IT controls, change configuration and release, strategic alignment and IT governance.

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This blog is for busy people who do things. And for people who make decisions about how to do things. It offers applied insights and lessons learned for IT infrastructure and operations professions responsible for building, managing and optimizing IT Operations in the cloud era.